“Mahler pursues Schubert’s goals with Wagner’s techniques.”

Transcript of full interview:

Do you remember the first time you heard the music of Mahler?

Tilson Thomas: I remember very clearly the moment when Mahler’s music reached out and grabbed me, when I was 13 years old. I was waiting at the house of my parents’ friends for some reason or another, and they were very busy people and they said, “Would you like to listen to some music? For example, do you know Das Lied von der Erde by Mahler?”, which of course I did not. And they said, “Why don’t you listen to the last movement – it’s about 20 minutes long and your parents should be here by then”. And they put on this section, and really I divide my life between before I heard that recording – which was Ferrier and Walter – and after I heard it. The music made a stunning impression on me; it was as if it gave voice to all kinds of feelings that I had, that were part of my family, that were part of the whole connection that my family had to life in small villages in the Ukraine, and the presence of Jewish music – both secular and sacred music – in those villages, and the pull of those different cultures. But when this part [sings extract] came in, it went right into my heart. I could not believe that such symphonic music existed, and I never got over it.

And how did you proceed then?

Tilson Thomas: Well, I began to look into his symphonies – just with some scores and recordings, familiarising myself with them. I got a piano score of Das Lied von der Erde and began to play that, and that led me to some of the other songs. But of course as a very young conductor you don’t really have many opportunities to conduct Mahler Symphonies, so I maybe just accompanied some songs a few times.

But I had another experience with Mahler at Tanglewood: Bernstein was conducting the 2nd Symphony and I was still a kind of fellowship student at the Berkshire Music Center, as it was called then. It was a Sunday afternoon at about 12:30, and I got a call saying the assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony is sick, and someone has to conduct the offstage music in Bernstein’s performance of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. You have been assigned to do this, and would you please go over there and talk to him. So I had heard Mahler’s 2nd Symphony a number of times – Walter’s recording, probably – but I had not studied it. Moreover, my responsibilities that summer were only to do with the contemporary music festival that was happening at Tanglewood; I had not been at any of the rehearsals – nothing. And I went over to see Bernstein, and of course he came at the last moment – I was waiting and waiting for him to show up – and he said “Oh yes, nice to meet you. I have a question for you, I need your advice.” And I said, “What, you need my advice?” And he said, “Yes, everyone thinks of me in terms of Mahler’s 2nd, like Mr. Mahler 2nd – people think I wrote the thing for heaven’s sake, but I’ve always conducted it with the score. I’ve never done it by heart in my entire life, but today I’m thinking of doing it by heart for the first time. What do you think of that idea?” And so I said, “What do I think of this idea? You must be joking!” But he was serious. Well you know the thing with those Mahler Symphonies is that you go along and there’s no problem, but then you always come to one of those transitions in the 2nd Symphony, and you can’t remember: Are there two bars of 3/2 and then a general pause, and then something starts? Or are there only two bars of 2/2, then a silence, and then something? And so you can really get mixed up. So he said, “Well I thought what I’d do is just conduct less and less, and finally I’d just stop and the music would stop, and then I’d go on.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll remember that.” And that’s what he did in the performance; I was watching backstage through a little spy-hole to see what he did.

Did you discuss Mahler with Bernstein later?

Tilson Thomas: Much later, but in the meantime I did suddenly, at the last moment, have an opportunity to conduct a Mahler Symphony, when I was 24 years old. The very first one I did was the 9th Symphony, which everyone thought was completely crazy but actually I think it was the symphony that spoke to me the most. Those were the two pieces that were the most natural for me at that point: Das Lied von der Erde and the 9th Symphony. And I did the piece and then I began to do many more of those pieces. Bernstein came to many of my early performances of those pieces and sometimes he would talk about, say, tempo relationships – like “that was exactly the right tempo relationship, that was good” or “you need to figure out this one” – but he wouldn’t really tell me anything, he would just encourage me to find my own way with the piece.

Besides this, Bernstein could see that I was on a particular track with the music, which was that I was going back to my first appreciation of the music to really investigate the possibilities of making the music sound idiomatic. So, although it’s part of a big structure, at particular moments the sound of some particular kind of music, some particular kind of ensemble comes through. It could be street music, or cabaret music, or religious music, or salon music, or military music, or whatever it is; but I really wanted to get the exact character of this music to be brought sharply into focus, so that the piece would be more like Mahler describes. He said, “I’m making my own worlds.” This is the kind of thing that a filmmaker would also say – you know, it’s like this big film and there are these different levels of activities. If it was a big Tarkovsky movie or something like that, you might have a scene where a large army is invading, and an enormous storm is taking place, and these big events are happening; and then on the side there’s this poor little old peddler, of pretzels or something like that, and he’s going along pushing his cart and saying, “Pretzels! Pretzels! Buy my pretzels!” And the cart has a broken wheel, and he has three unmarried daughters so he has to make a lot of money selling these pretzels. A director wouldn’t even use an actor for a part like that; he would probably go out – someone like Fellini or Tarkovsky – and find a real person on the street to come in and just do it. 

And I think that’s part of the challenge of these big Mahler pieces, that there are moments when things really need to have a rough character, coming from one of these other genres. It’s a challenge for orchestral players to do that, because they have been trained to play everything as beautifully and perfectly and nobly as possible, and here Mahler is asking them from time to time to do something which is completely grotesque, and way beyond the boundaries what of good taste is supposed to be. And that is exactly what irritated performers in Mahler’s time so much, and it still does irritate them. They say, “there are too many instructions, there are all these sforzandos and accents, and this and that, and markings like grell or whatever. And he’s just asking for too much – he’s forcing us to do all of these things, many of which go against the way we would really like to play.” But of course Mahler really wants the symphony, his ‘world’ to represent worlds that he actually knew in his life. And his version of those worlds is in the music, and that is the challenge, to make that as vivid as possible whilst at the same time allowing the big shape, which is so powerful in this music, to emerge.

Would you say that Bernstein’s style of really emotionalising the music has influenced you?

Tilson Thomas: In some pieces, yes. For example, it was a shock for me to hear his performance of the 6th Symphony with the New York Philharmonic, which I think suited the nature of the orchestra and the nature of his energy in the early days: it was so powerful, so on the edge. And then later he went through a process of discovering the lyrical side of the music much more. But you know, Bernstein did not believe in musical absolutes so much; it was more like you were on a particular journey with the music – everybody is – and different things emerge from that. He once said to me, when I asked what he thought about something in one performance – in a much ruder way than this: “When you have totally made up your mind, you think it won’t make any difference to you what I think.”

You touched on the 6th Symphony; some people say that in the last movement of the 6th, Mahler anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century. Would you agree with that?

Tilson Thomas: He certainly went through some enormous crisis; the mood of the piece is so pessimistic, it’s so unforgiving and driven. The whole piece is a kind of mania, isn’t it? It’s a kind of militaristic mania actually, and also the consequences of that. And we know that he was close to suicide, or certainly in a very desperate place – to write a piece like that is scary, I’m sure. We’re so lucky that he completed it, and in a way its message is optimistic in that he didn’t kill himself. And he had written this piece that says, this is something everybody is afraid of, we all have these fears and these observations where we wonder what is happening, with this unstoppable force of aggression inside society that none of us seem to be able to control. We all have those feelings. That was a very generous impulse on his part, to complete that.

And in that symphony there are also many aspects of a gesture that is fundamental to Mahler, which is to try very hard to do something, again and again, to achieve something, and finally to come to a point where he just has no more solutions and gives up. And in the earlier symphonies, of course that is the moment when the conclusion finally comes to him. So in the 2nd Symphony, the grosse Appell [The Great Call] winds down and only then, from that Ruhigkeit [tranquillity], that Schwachheit [frailty], does the [sings] “Auferstehen” [resurrection] emerge. Or in the 3rd Symphony, where he keeps trying to get to D major, and no matter what he does he always hits that B flat and suddenly it’s back to [sings theme] all over again. And finally it’s like he’s completely given up and then you have this little flute melody [sings], and then the piccolo [sings], and only then does the answer he’s been looking for finally come. It’s as if he’s saying, I can’t get this answer through my Kraft and Arbeit [strength and work] – it’s not possible – I can only get it from something that comes from somewhere else, and this is part of his pantheistic, spiritual conception of things. But that same thing happens in the 4th Symphony [sings extract]; it just disappears into nothing, before the entry, ‘Ich bin der Welt’, which he quotes so often. And only then can Das himmlische Leben start, when he’s said okay, no more, I can’t do any more. And in the 6th Symphony that really happens in two places: it happens in the extraordinary 2nd, or 3rd, movement – and we could talk about that for the rest of the day! – but in any case, in that andante con moto movement, which is one of the greatest examples of a climax which does not happen. It comes to this point [sings extract], and it goes and goes and goes, and then just kind of loses it and that’s all there is.

So he’s really masterful when it comes to understanding how these things work formally, and he gets better and better at it as he gets older. Just a couple of very obvious examples: in the 8th Symphony there are all these themes in the first movement, fine; they come back in the second movement – yes, of course we know that the second movement introduces this theme [sings] in the most tragic way, which becomes Alles Vergängliche with the big triumph at the end, fine. But what I find so interesting is that there’s this other theme [sings it], and with all of these themes we hear them set to many different texts in the course of the symphony, but that is actually not the case with this theme. It appears when the Ewige-Weibliche makes her appearance, in the violin solo [sings], but the only time we hear words set to it is when the spirit formerly known as Gretchen sees Faust coming into heaven, and she sings this ‘Neige, neige, du Ohnegleiche’; and then she sings ‘Der früh Geliebte, nicht mehr Getrübte. Er kommt zurück, er kommt zurück’ and so on. That’s the only time there’s a text to that theme, and I think that is because at the climax of the piece – the Chorus Mysticus – it’s the biggest climax and everyone is singing full-force and all the brass come in [sings extract], and I think this is Mahler’s way of suggesting that the love of this simple little girl is equal in majesty to the entire design of the universe. I think that’s what he means.

Is there a Mahler work that you feel particularly close to?

Tilson Thomas: Well, when I think about moments like that obviously I feel very close to it [the 8th]; I can’t think about it without being very emotional, because he takes such huge risks and he shows so much. Or another great moment is in the first movement of the 9th Symphony, where there is this little turn figure [sings]. I think it appears once in the first movement, at the climax. In the second movement it is altered [sings] and becomes part of the ländler. In the third movement, in the Burleske, it becomes a parody of the way Mahler imagines that people see him [sings extract] – it is a grotesque little scurrying tune, which is then transfigured in the middle part of the movement into a different melody [sings] that says, this is who I really am, these are what my intentions really are. And of course it is in the last movement [sings] and even the very, very last notes of the piece. So a motive that was introduced briefly in the first movement is made, step by step, to become the main idea of the piece, and the emotional ride that this takes you on is really big stuff: this is the kind of thing that Schubert dreamed of doing, and sometimes even did do. But it seems to me that there is a strong connection between Schubert and Mahler, because what Mahler really does is to pursue Schubert’s goals with Wagner’s techniques. Mahler’s music is like Schubert’s music, in that it is based much more on song forms and dance forms – he’s not doing the Wagner thing of abstraction, chromaticism, and so on. He’s not doing that, though of course he’s aware of it, and he knows it harmonically and in terms of orchestration from his experience as a great conductor. He knows exactly how it works but that’s not what he’s writing. His material is like this [sings extract]: that’s the world, it’s the Schubert world, the world of folksong. But Mahler is using this on a whole other level, he uses his own apparatus to build a bridge between Schubert’s time and his own time.

And what role does Bruckner play in this process?

Tilson Thomas: Well he’s obviously there, and Mahler knew his music so well and was a champion of his music to some extent – especially the 3rd Symphony, by means of writing a piano transcription of it; and the 6th Symphony, by performing it. Although, as usual, Mahler got himself into a lot of trouble by publishing this little pamphlet in which he explained that he really did love Bruckner, in spite of the fact that everyone knows that Bruckner’s modulations have problems, and the form has problems, and the orchestration is not perfect. He knows that Bruckner’s music is going to survive forever, especially if it’s done in his, Mahler’s, versions. So he makes the controversy even worse! He can’t stop jumping into the middle of these situations.

How much influence do you think Mahler’s life had on his music? I mean, the first movement of the 9th Symphony, does it really represent his heart condition?

Tilson Thomas: My feeling on that is that he had a vast set of associations, and some of this had to do with things that happened in Jihlava; and some of it was about what happened in Leipzig; and some of it was what happened in Budapest; and some of it was what happened when he met Alma; and some of it was when the woman for whom Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen was written turned him down; and some of it was when his brothers and sisters died. And later it was about when his daughter died, and his triumphs as an artist. I think it was all there all the time, and certainly the pieces are one piece, but with different priorities at different moments, it’s a question of where the story starts in that particular piece, but he’s aware of the whole picture the whole time.

Does Mahler’s music require a special technique of conducting?

Tilson Thomas: Yes, I mean as he goes on he gets more and more interested in very slow tempi, so some of the most difficult things are in the later pieces. For example, in the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde at the end of the Abschied you have this rubato of twos and threes and fours, and some pizzicato and some tenuto cantando, and somehow this all has to work. It can’t sound like it’s in a tempo Gefängnis [prison], it has to have a kind of flow and freedom within this organised rubato. And of course this has a strong influence on Berg, particularly – there are so many situations in Berg where you have minim equals 38 or whatever, and all sorts of things are going on – and subdividing this music doesn’t really work, you just have to be able to get this big, very slow pulse, while people are playing all sorts of different things. And the idea of the pulse does get slower.

The first movement of the 10th Symphony is one of the hardest things to learn in Mahler – for me, anyway – because there is no pulse really, just this sort of floating feel, although there is a pulse sometimes in the middle section. But a lot of is like I don’t know what, it’s like expressionistic Palestrina or something like that, it’s just these moving lines, and you have to develop your sense of where the cadences are and where the rubati are. The quality of the sound is not easy to absorb; it’s much easier to absorb these other lines, like this [sings extract].

In which direction would Mahler have proceeded?

Tilson Thomas: Well as you know, even if the 10th Symphony was deliberately written in these strange keys with so many sharps and flats and so on, it was because he wanted to avoid doing the same things he had done before. He felt that he knew all the moves inside certain keys very well, so forcing himself to think in a key like D sharp minor, for example – which just makes you think, What? What is D sharp minor for God’s sake?! – forced him to expand his thinking. And his music, like Schubert’s music, certainly deals with the question, is D sharp the same thing as E flat, is it the same note? On the piano it is but we know very well that it’s not the same note, and Berg and the others really exploited this idea even more. Debussy was certainly exploiting exactly that question. So I think Mahler was maybe on a road towards more lyrical music, but involving more subtle levels of harmonic ambiguity, perhaps with less sharp contrast. And yet it’s so striking, isn’t it, that there really are moments, even in the 10th Symphony, which you can link back as far as to the Piano Quartet in terms of particular harmonic instances.

Another thing that happened in Mahler’s life, in the beginning of his musical life, was that it was an important thing to figure out which notes not to write. If you think of the Piano Quintet, we all know it’s Mahler – you can tell in five seconds – but it also sounds like really terrible music, because it’s just so heavy. So the difference between this and Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – which is only five, seven years later – is that he has now learned not to put all those chords there. So he just has two little duets and something in the bass and maybe something in the middle, but he’s learned that his listeners’ ears will fill in all of this other stuff. This is what he does in the first few Symphonies; and then in the middle Symphonies he reverses the process, it gets much more complicated; and then in the last pieces he goes back to the simpler direction again. That’s what is happening in those last pieces: it’s getting simpler, just as Berg’s music became simpler in the very last period.

So with the last page of the 9th Symphony did he probably open the door to modern music and new aesthetics – with the technique of collage for instance?

Tilson Thomas: Well, a lot of people were playing with that. I mean Ives, of course; from our perspective today we realise how many 20th century ideas, and even ideas which were not popular until the very end of the century, come from this. One of the people who I would say was very much influenced by Mahler was Stockhausen, and he even wrote an article in de La Grange’s book in which he says, this is the guy I’m paying attention to. And I don’t know what Stockhausen said about Ives, but certainly these pieces he did with electronics in the 70s are really doing the same kind of thing that these guys were doing. That is, they were trying to create this collage environment out of streams of different music from many different sources and somehow make them exist in one space.

Would you say that, as a conductor, your approach to particular works has changed, that your experience has given you the key to some works?

Tilson Thomas: Naturally [laughs]. Since half an hour ago I really understand it all!

Let me put it another way. Some conductors have told me that when they started to conduct Mahler they overpowered it, but their personal approach changed and developed. Would you say something similar?

Tilson Thomas: Well, I’ve always been very faithful to what the score actually asks for – of course that can mean many things – but particularly in the tempo relationships between one section and another. I mostly found that when I did things which I felt were more exciting or gutsier or gave me a chance to inhabit my ‘maestrodom’, I ultimately came to regret those things. As I understood more, I felt that they obscured some points which were better or stronger, and that he really knew what he was doing and knew very well what he was asking for.

In all of Mahler’s music I can think of a few places which just don’t add up, no matter what. One of these is the end of the song Um Mitternacht: no matter how hard you try to figure out a relationship you have to really work at it. Another one, which I think works much better once you’ve decided that’s the way it is – is the last movement of the 7th Symphony, which I so love. But I struggle and, my God, I’ve seen many of my colleagues struggle to figure out some way that this relates to this relates to this, and I think that really imprisons the music. I think the idea of that movement is very much discontinuity. It’s like it anticipates techniques in film or in sound editing, of just, Jump! Cut! Bang! [sings extract]. The more discontinuous it is, the better it works I think, and actually you discover that orchestras can learn and remember an exact place in tempo and in musical gesture, and they can just play it like that going from one to another, in a very exciting, if dangerous, way.

So this was probably one of the difficulties for the audience that made it hard for them to accept Mahler.

Tilson Thomas: Well, the audience were confounded by how long it was, how it seemed to be so many different things. They could accept that one part was very beautiful, but then what about this other part that was so noisy or confrontational, and they couldn’t work it out. Maybe this was one reason why the 4th Symphony was the Mahler piece that was liked the most by musicians and more traditional audience members, for a very, very long time. And then maybe Das Lied von der Erde joined it, but it took longer with some of these other pieces, like the 2nd Symphony. People were disturbed by the number of different things the music contained. And maybe they were also disturbed – and this was something that Mahler himself recognised – by his obsession with presenting music, and then presenting it again as a parody, in a way that went against what the mood of the music had been the first time. People couldn’t work that out, why somebody would be doing that – there was no space in the music for them to relax, which was very much what audiences wanted to be able to do. You probably know that as a conductor Mahler was criticised by the press in Vienna, because they said, he’s trying to show us his ideals, he’s trying to show us the moment of creative crisis when the composer – Beethoven or whoever – wrote this piece. And the critic who wrote this article says, that’s completely wrong. For example, in my sitting room at home I have a beautiful little niche in the wall and I’m going to commission a sculptor to create a beautiful marble statue of a young woman to go in this niche. And I understand that when the sculptor is doing this it’s a big crisis to make a statue: you can hammer too hard and the stone can break, and you can have a big crisis of fear and think do I dare do this, and all the tension that goes into making this statue – but I’m completely uninterested in that. I just want to sit in my sitting room and have this beautiful statue there, and it’s there and it’s smooth and decorative and it makes me feel good. That’s the same way I feel about these great musical masterpieces, so this critic wrote, I don’t want to be taken to this moment of crisis in which the piece was written. So this was a very daring thing that Mahler was doing, just from the standpoint of modern, interpretative impulse.

As a conductor of Mahler – the ‘Resurrection’, for example – is there a danger of being more emotionally involved than you should be?

Tilson Thomas: I tend to be the most emotionally involved in the rehearsals, or when I’m just thinking about or studying the music, because in the performance it’s very clear to me that it is the musicians who are giving the performance. I want to be as clear and supportive as possible, so that they can be the ones who are really out on the edge emotionally. I think that works best if you can achieve it.

Last question: what is Mahler’s greatest achievement?

Tilson Thomas: Oh, my God.

Yes, I know. The simple questions are the most difficult.

Tilson Thomas: I think that Mahler was one of those composers in the early 20th century who succeeded in making us appreciate the value of many different kinds of music and music-making. He made us appreciate the sincerity of people who, at whatever level, are making music. Mahler managed to find a way to put this music together into a world, a single view of the world, and to understand that there is a kind of shared spirit that all of this music-making witnesses. I’ve often said this in relation to other composers, like Ives for example, and to some extent Debussy. There is a wonderful poem by Walt Whitman – actually it’s not a poem, it’s something he was sketching, a poem about music. And he says in that poem, all the different songs in the world – the song the blacksmith sings, and the song the mother sings, and the song the soldier sings, and the song that the Chinaman sings – all these different songs pull in different directions, and seem to be in conflict with one another, yet, from another perspective, perhaps all merge into one great song of mankind. And there’s something of this in Mahler’s perspective. Perhaps also his feeling that the music is made and will come to an end, but that the feelings we have when the music is over – what we can take from the music into our lives and hearts – is maybe his most important message. He wants us to understand the way he feels about things, the way life tastes to him.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler, Universal Edition
Transcript: Flora Death
© Universal Edition